[clue-tech] Help Recovering from grub-install error

[Matt Gushee]

gthrelk at comcast.net wrote:

>>You haven't lost your data, everything about Windows is fine except the 
>>boot partition.  You can copy off the data and reinstall, which might be 
>>quickest, or you can understand your partition tables and MBRs well 
>>enough to fix them (that's my vote, then you might learn enough not to 
>>break them in the future).
>>
>>I don't have time to speculate more at the moment, but send me the 
>>output of these commands:

> Can't really tell you where grub was originally.  I would have thought that 
> /dev/hda and /dev/hda1 both pointed to the same area i.e. the beginning of the 
> first disk.  Looking at the results of your requested commands, I guess 
> I've already learned something new since they show different results.  

Right. /dev/hda represents the whole disk, while /dev/hda1 is the first 
partition. The first 512 (?--or is it 1024?) bytes of /dev/hda are the 
Master Boot Record (MBR).

> I've attached the output of the fdisk -l and sudo command output.  Ignore 
> the third disk, its a disk that I just hooked up that's empty.... space for me 
> to copy if that's my only option.  If I must do the copy, as I can't seem to 
> view the vfat files with windows, do you have a suggestion as to how best to 
> copy using Linux?

It should be dead simple. First of all, you need to mount the Windows 
partition under Linux. I haven't used any RedHattish Linux for 2 or 3 
years, but most modern Linuces with stock kernels and default 
configurations will let you just do (possibly as root):

     mount /c  # Or whatever the mount point is called

Fedora/GNOME might have some sort of automounting capability, such that 
the partition will get mounted when you click on it in the file manager.

As far as copying goes, I would probably do something like:

     for dir in foo bar baz; do
         tar cpf /my/backup/directory/`basename $dir`.tar /c/$dir
     done

[ I dunno how much shell scripting you know--let me know if there's
   anything unclear about that. ]
Coupla comments on the tar options: it's been a long time since I've 
dealt with a Win partition, but I think the 'p' flag will preserve the 
permissions on all the files. Note that there's no compression. If you 
have enough spare disk space, you're better off not compressing. 
Compressing a whole partition takes a looong time, even with gzip; bzip2 
is ridiculous.

Now, there will be one semi-serious problem: your file names will 
probably be mangled. Long file names in Windows (at least in 9x; not 
sure about XP) are implemented in the GUI layer; the underlying names 
are old-style DOS 8.3, and that's all that Linux can see. I imagine 
there's some tool or kernel module that can read the long file names, 
but I doubt that it comes built into the system, even FC3.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA